On 23/09/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster(a)davidarussell.co.uk> wrote: It's possible to do all sorts of things; whether they do is another matter, of course. - d.

On 9/23/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Well, the reason that's always struck me as the most compelling, although I don't know that I've actually heard anyone use it (probably because I've been pretty successful in ignoring AfD), is that if we admit everything that's third party verifiable we will have expanded well past the point where our core group of editors is capable of enforcing our core content policies (particularly NPOV) on the amount of material we'll have. We may have already expanded to this point, for that matter; I certainly know that we've passed the point where we're no longer able to prevent a large portion of the articles from really sucking (see WP:CBM, especially the stuff that's been tagged for a year or more). This is a problem because people who see badly written or non-neutral articles as one of the first things they encounter at Wikipedia are probably either going to go away and not contribute or contribute stuff that meets the same description. AaronSw's survey results have shown that most material is contributed by drive-by editors, but most formatting, wikifying, etc.--i.e. actually incorporating the new stuff into the encyclopedia--is done by core community members. Notability provides a method of callibrating the amount of incoming content at a level that our existing group of core editors can actually handle and assimilate. The question, in my opinion, when considering the inclusion of an article, is not "is this subject notable enough to be worth writing/reading about", but rather "if we include this subject and all equally notable subjects, will our regulars be able to enforce the core policies on the resulting influx of articles. So, to get back to the original question of this thread, I think we should be concerned about the dropping inclusion threshold for pop culture at least, since that's an area where it seems to me that the community as it exists is not successfully enforcing important policies such as NPOV and whichever non-core-but- still-important policy says states that we want encyclopedia articles, not trivia piles. Some subjects aren't a problem; very few Rambot articles get taken over by hagiographers or POV warriors. A fair number of school articles do end up contravening NPOV. We should draw conclusions about the effect of including these various article types based on the current state of similar articles that we already have, and draw up whatever standards we need to make sure that we can manage the material we take on in that subject area in the future. --Robth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Robth)

On 9/24/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: We don't cut subject areas, we just limit our depth of coverage to include only as many articles as we're capable of keeping in line with our core policies. Thus, for Israel-Palestine, we probably wouldn't want to have articles on, say, every single jailed Palestinian militant, since I doubt we have enough core editors to enforce NPOV on all of them. For schools, we wouldn't cut all school articles, but rather see how many we seem to be capable of maintaining in a neutral, verifiable state, and draw a line accordingly, probably based on the amount of independently published material. What I'm suggesting is basically to treat subject independently and determine how much material the community of editors that works on that subject is able to support; then come up with a notablility threshhold based on that. --Robth

On 9/24/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson(a)gmail.com> wrote: fortunetly we can mix it with NPOV to get "there must be enough stuf from [[WP:RS]] to produce a NPOV article" which means a reasonable number of sources. -- geni

On 9/24/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote: Then improve it. -- geni

On Sep 24, 2006, at 12:32 PM, geni wrote: I find that people who delete entire guideline pages (or any other pages) without warning get RFCs, and then later people bring those RFCs up on the listserv in bizarre attempts to sling mud. -Phil

On 9/24/06, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: Out of curiosity, what page was it? Whatever it was, I'm assuming that it wasn't as important as WP:RS --Oskar

On Sun, 24 Sep 2006 12:08:12 -0400, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote: The only thing worse would be not requiring reliable sources... Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On Sep 25, 2006, at 3:23 PM, Mark Wagner wrote: Define Wikilawyering. And common sense. And being flexible instead of having hardline rules. Then all of the hair-splitting becomes a lot easier to deal with. -Phil

On Sep 25, 2006, at 4:23 PM, David Russell wrote: Home-schooling in Michigan is not unusual. That they put a "school name" on the books does not make a given home-school notable. -Phil

On 25/09/06, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: Third-party verifiability would be the first line. - d.

On 9/25/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: But where's the second line? The Michigan homeschools are verifiable: since they're treated as private schools, they need to be registered with the Michigan Department of Education. -- Mark [[User:Carnildo]]

On 26/09/06, Mark Wagner <carnildo(a)gmail.com> wrote: Make a list article, giving your verifiable source, I suppose. See if the school inclusionists rally to it on the inevitable AFD ;-) - d.

On 9/26/06, Anthony DiPierro <dipierro(a)gmail.com> wrote: Because we have the notion that all schools are inherently notable, apparently the fact that something exists _is_ an article. Or, if you take the list approach, _part_ of an article. Notability should be the first line, with criteria being such that only actual schools are counted (at a maximum). Such criteria could include: - A school tied directly to the government (i.e., public schools) - A school run by a board of directors/trustees or similar form of government. This does not include any strictly regulatory agencies such as a state Department of Education. - Accreditation by some board of accreditation. Carl

On 25/09/06, David Russell <webmaster(a)davidarussell.co.uk> wrote: Ah, no. The *arrangement* is highly notable - an individual incidence of the arrangement isn't. We can and should write about the legal loophole Michigan uses to handle homeschooling; this doesn't mean that a single specific homeschool is notable, unless it's the only one that loophole applies to. To use a different, and hopefully clearer, example... you know "John Doe"? The name comes from an archaic English law proceeding, which involved having to make up fictional plaintiffs and defendants in order to permit a court to hear land-possession cases. The proceeding (a mixed action of ejectment) is very notable - not only did it give the English-speaking world a commonly used general-purpose name, but it made all sorts of interesting leaps forward in jurisprudence. But any individual case of it - this or that particular occurence of John Doe in a land register in 1342 - is not itself notable. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Mark Wagner wrote: Ah. I was under the impression that ALL of the homeschool students in Michigan were listed as attending that single school. Obviously if there is one school for each homeschooling family then no. Cynical

On 9/25/06, Mark Wagner <carnildo(a)gmail.com> wrote: Interestingly, Wikipedia *does* have an article on [[Vernon-Dunlap School]], a school in Michigan whose article doesn't preclude it being the same school you're talking about. Anthony